Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8994 in Books
• Published on: 2001-08-10
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

Synopsis
A comprehensive guide for improving your creative writing. This coursebook takes aspiring writers through three stages of practice: gathering - getting started, learning how to keep notes, making observations and using memory; shaping - looking at structure, points of view, character and setting; and finishing - being your own critic, joining workshops, finding publishers. Throughout exercises and activities encourage writers to develop their skills. Contributions from forty authors provide a generous pool of information, experience and advice. This book should be of interest to those who are just starting to write as well as those who want some help honing work already completed. It should suit people writing for publication or just for their own pleasure, those writing on their own or writing groups.

Customer Reviews

two thirds of this book is really useful
I bought this book quite a while ago and still dip into it now and again for inspiration. Different writers give their advice, and i have earmarked those chapters written by the writers i found the most inspiring/helpful. There are two or three 'advisers' whose advice is a little superior and somewhat irritating, but this is made up for by those whose advice i have gleaned plenty from. I have recommended this book to several writing friends, and was certainly glad to discover it myself. You WILL find this book useful and an ispiration when you are stuck for where to go next in your story. If you read this book with 'your story' in mind, you will end up writing down copious notes for ideas...my copy of this book is full of margin notes!! Certainly worth the money.

Not helpful at all
This book implies that is is a guide to creative writing. I found it irritating. It's more like a group of people discussing elements of writing from their own particular perspective, with little to no constructive advice.

Yes there are excercises suggested, but the instructions are often badly laid out. There is a certain element of literary 'snobbery' - commercial success appears to be frowned upon by the authors and contributors.

I would not recommend it to anyone who is looking for an introduction to creative writing, especially if their interest lies in popular fiction.

Not actually much use
Imagine you wanted to learn wood working. But imagine you bought a book full of sentences like, "Wood is as old as the world", or, "To be human is to need wooden furniture...".

You'd feel a little ripped off. You want actual instructions on how to work with wood, not thoughtful aphorisms, no matter how clever.

That's the problem with this book. Need advice on plotting? Well, in the "Plotting and shaping" section you'll read, "We write things in order to make sense of the world". That's true, I guess. Even profound. But not a great deal of use. Where's discussion of narrative arcs? Where are real examples of plots taken from real books, showing how it's been done in the past, complete with expert commentary? In short, where's the substance?

There's a lot more exactly like that. This isn't a book that teaches. It suggests and implies. It waves a hand in the direction of travel but doesn't give actual directions. Sadly, this is all-too common in creative writing literature. Authors can be as secretive as magicians in guarding their techniques and methods. There's a reluctance to closely analyse technique, perhaps for fear of breaking it.

Others reviewers have suggested that this book is "inspiring". That might be true but for that to be the case you'd need to have already learnt the skills this book purports to teach (it is, after all, a "coursebook"). Above all, I keep coming back to the thought that this book teaches its readers to suck eggs... To tread water when you want to learn how to swim.

The book can also be annoyingly patronising and has definite concepts of high and low literature. Of "Bestselling plots", one contributor writes sniffly that they belong to "books sold in dump bins at airports". Thanks for that opinion, but is it helpful? This rather cynical theme runs throughout the book. You're unlikely to find discussion of books by Harold Robbins, or Stephen King, or Frederick Forsyth, or Catherine Cookson (or any other popular author -- the books that people actually buy and enjoy). But you will find mention of Virginia Wolfe. I'd check for more examples like this but the book lacks an index -- another annoyance.

There is some good stuff in this book, and I've given it 3 out of 5 for being so readable and entertaining. But it's perilously close to being a useless frivolity. Reading it is a matter of sifting the silt to find the gold. Worse than that, there's a lot of iron pyrite sprinkled in there, in the form of aphorisms and vague advice that looks valuable, but is actually worthless.